Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust

ISBN-13: 9780415060998 / Angielski / Miękka / 1992 / 284 str.

Dina Wardi

Opis

As the children of Holocaust survivors reach adulthood they often need professional help in establishing a new identity and self-esteem because, during their childhood, their parents have unconsciously transmitted to them so much of their own trauma, investing them with all their memories and hopes, so that they become the living memorial candles of the title. Memorial Candles combines verbatim transcriptions of dialogues in individual and group psychotherapy sessions, with analysis of dreams, fantasies and childhood memories. Starting with the disruption of the inter-generational chain resulting from the parents' abrupt separation from their families, the reader is led through their hasty marriages after the war and the birth of their first children, intended as memorial candles to their families. Diana Wardi examines the children's infancy in the dense atmosphere of survivor families and their conflictual separation upon maturity. Wardi also examines identity disturbances peculiar to second-generation Holocaust survivors including identification with death, and particular problems with self-esteem and sexual identity.

Recenzje

` ... great value to all those whose work brings them face to face with the traumatic effects of the Holocaust upon survivors of all nationalities and their children ... special interest to those involved in the study of post-traumatic stress in general and intergenerational trauma transmission in particular.' - American Academy of Psychoanalysis Journal

`A powerful, richly informative book.' - Jewish Chronicle

Spis treści

Introduction; Chapter 1 Survivor parents - uprooting and separation traumas; Chapter 2 Designating the children as ‘memorial candles’; Chapter 3 The dialogue between survivor mothers and their infants; Chapter 4 Identification with death; Chapter 5 The aggressor and the victim; Chapter 6 Self-esteem and sexual identity; Chapter 7 Parting from the role of ‘memorial candle’;

O autorze

Born in Italy in 1938, Dina Wardi was taken to Israel by her Zionist parents at the age of one year and thus escaped the fate of her people in the Holocaust. She lives in Jerusalem, where she conducts her psychotherapeutic practice.